They can be seen without any effort through the car windows leaving or entering Barcelona on the C-33. Dozens of shanties are piled up a few meters from the highway and, week after week, new constructions appear, if you can call them that. They started as classic orchard houses, evolved into small slums and some are already on the second floor. . In the Free Zone the substandard housing takes the form of a tent. And in El Prat de Llobregat and Badalona they are hidden inside old industrial warehouses and other disused buildings. Hidden is a saying, of course. They may go unnoticed by the happy observer who only sees the Barcelona area from a bird’s eye view or as a global theme park but not by those who live there.
Seeing the new proliferation of slums one can only wonder how we got here. The most accommodating will say that, deep down, barracks have never disappeared from the metropolitan area of Barcelona. Or that, in the best of cases, it went from horizontal shantytowns in El Camp de la Bota to vertical shantytowns in La Mina. But there were a few years, in the heat of the Olympic Games and even the Forum of Cultures, when eliminating substandard housing seemed like a goal within reach.
With greater or lesser success, those who lived crowded on the slopes of Montjuïc were relocated, like those who did in Can Tunis, Carmel or Somorrostro. It was done under questionable conditions and often with the sole intention of hiding poverty rather than solving it. But it was done. What then prevents the Catalonia of 2025, which boasts of reaching wealth levels of the European average, from facing a problem that is a minority but highly explosive?
The answers probably have to be sought in the growing insensitivity towards the problems of others. If one has a hard time paying the rent or the mortgage, how can one worry about those who, often newcomers, live piled up under the scrap metal. The person who connects well with this vision of the world is the mayor of Badalona, Xavier García Albiol, who does not hide that the only thing he is looking for is . But kicking them out means they go somewhere else, and the neighboring mayors tremble just thinking about it.
A Catalan plan against barracks is urgent. The Generalitat announced it with great fanfare in 2022. Since then, and through a change of government, little or nothing has been known about it. . And budget, of course. It is a ticking time bomb today. But some seem more interested in extracting a vote from the miseries of others than in fixing the problem. Throwing out the poor continues to be more cost-effective than fighting poverty.
